When the news broke that HP was buying Palm, discussion gravitated to the jewel of the Palm collection: WebOS. But of course HP's haul doesn't end there—there's a whole slew of bizarre PalmPilot patents they'll soon own, too.

Harry McCracken has gone through the trouble of compiling some of these PalmPilots that never were over on Technologizer. Most were filed in the 1990s and they range from the curious yet sensible, like a wall mounted docking cradle, to the downright freakish, like the clam shell PalmPilot Frankenphone depicted above.

Some of these ideas came to pass in similar form by other companies—docking a smaller device in a gaming exoskeleton, for example—while others never really made sense to begin with—like unscrewing the tip of a stylus to function as a joystick for the PDA.

Maybe someday some of these oddities will be of use to HP, though most likely will not. But that doesn't make it any less fun to look at the weird, obscure loot that changes hands in a huge deal like this. To see the rest of the set, head over to Technologizer.